The 7th Annual Year in Ideas

Published: December 9, 2007

HONEYCOMB VASE, THE [22] How many workers does it take to make a vase? To devotees of the Arts and Crafts Movement, it's one. But in the case of the Honeycomb Vase, it's 40,000 -- because the ''workers'' who made it were bees toiling in their hive.

The vase was conceived by Tom?Gabzdil Libertiny, a young Slovakian product designer. Eager to explore the relationship between design and nature, he settled upon beeswax as a suitable material and chose the vase as an appropriate object to make from it. ''Beeswax comes from flowers and, in the form of a vase, it ends up containing flowers before they die,'' Libertiny says. ''It's a beautiful story.''

Initially, Libertiny designed and made a vase in the conventional way by casting solid beeswax into shape by himself. But then he decided to see what would happen if bees contributed to the process. He created a vase-shaped space in a beehive and installed a camera to film the process. ''The bees worked like a prototyping machine,'' he says. ''Slowly, layer by layer, they add tiny bits of beeswax.'' He and the bees have now produced a dozen Honeycomb Vases, one of which was exhibited at the Milan Furniture Fair in April.

Intriguing though the vases are, they're not likely to revolutionize vase manufacturing. For one thing, they can be made only from April to June, when the bees are at their most productive; for another it takes the bees around a week to make each one. The clincher is that the vases aren't watertight.

The solid-beeswax vases are, though, and Libertiny is convinced that flowers last longer in them, because beeswax contains propolis, an antibacterial agent that protects against biological decay. ''We found out by accident,'' he explains. ''We had a bouquet, which was too big for the beeswax vase, so we put half of the flowers in a glass vase. We noticed the difference after a week or so.'' ALICE RAWSTHORN

HOPE CAN BE WORSE THAN HOPELESSNESS People often display a remarkable ability to adapt to adversity, bouncing back to their usual levels of happiness despite extreme hardships. But people don't always rebound, and scientists have long wondered what factors might account for the difference. In a talk at Harvard in September, a team of researchers suggested that one obstacle to emotional recovery, oddly enough, is hope -- the belief that your current hardship is temporary.

From the beginning, the investigators suspected that hope might sometimes be counterproductive: prisoners with life sentences but with the possibility of parole adapt less well to prison life, for example, than prisoners with life sentences without the possibility of parole. But the researchers sought another empirical test. Their choice: Colostomy patients. The research team, led by Peter Ubel, a physician at the University of Michigan, tracked people who had portions of their colons removed or bypassed, such that the patients couldn't defecate normally. The condition is extremely unpleasant and leads many people to say they'd rather be dead, Ubel reports. But a colostomy isn't always permanent. Some patients are likely to heal and have their bowels reconnected. Whether your colostomy is permanent depends on your condition, but were it up to the patient to choose, ''almost anybody would choose temporary over permanent,'' Ubel says.

So it's surprising that the permanent-colostomy patients ended up happier six months after the operation than the temporary group, whose members were still holding out hope. Patients with a temporary colostomy experienced a significant drop in life satisfaction versus patients in the permanent group [23].

It might seem strange that patients who are better off objectively were less satisfied with their lives, yet the finding makes sense: ''If your condition is temporary,'' Ubel explains, ''you're thinking, I can't wait until I get rid of this.'' Ubel says thoughts like these keep you from moving on with your life and focusing on the many good things that remain. MARINA KRAKOVSKY

ICONIC-PERFORMANCE-NETWORK PLAYER, THE A new kind of sports star emerged in the baseball playoffs in October. Only his debut wasn't on the field -- it was in the phrasing of an agent, Scott Boras. His client Alex Rodriguez [24] was no longer a mere superstar. He was now, Boras said, an I.P.N., or Iconic-Performance-Network, player. The I and P parts of the equation were self-evident and beyond dispute. The N was the next level, however. It was Boras's way of saying that A-Rod produced more than runs and victories; he was an all-star revenue producer for the New York Yankees.

Boras had a case. Since Rodriguez was traded to the Yankees in 2004, the team's total attendance has risen every year, surpassing 4 million for the first time in 2005 (Rodriguez's second M.V.P. season) on the way to 4,271,867 in 2007 (his third). An even greater increase marks the growth of the team's regional TV business, the YES Network, which last season had its highest ratings ever. Boras also argued that six years from now, as Rodriguez approaches the all-time home-run record, even more viewers and revenue will accrue to A-Rod's team.